Shi Ting (’03) writes for the South China Morning Post on corrupt officials fleeing China with their pilfered riches:

The international pursuit of fugitive Chinese bankers has drawn fresh attention to an exodus of corrupt financial officials and highlighted China’s uphill battle in cleaning up a banking system riddled with corruption and mismanagement.

According to reports in the official media, around 4,000 officials - most of them bankers, fund managers and officials at financial institutions - have pocketed billions of yuan before fleeing the country in recent years.

Gao Shan , former head of a Bank of China sub-branch in Harbin , allegedly siphoned a billion yuan from customers’ accounts to Canada between 2002 and 2004.

The scandal only surfaced when Northeast Expressway, a highway company, discovered in January 2005 that 3 million yuan was missing from its account. It led to further investigations which found as much as 800 million yuan of clients’ deposits were unaccounted for.

See the full article here.

Wu Nan (’08) interviews Yomiuri Shimbun senior researcher and journalism school visiting lecturer Ryoichi Hamamoto for China Digital Times’ ChinaCast. Hamamoto is a former Beijing bureau chief for Yomiuri, the world’s largest-circulation daily newspaper, and is currently co-teaching the Asia Colloqium seminar on Japan with Professor Carolyn Wakeman:

During Hamamoto’s two assignments in China, he experienced two important eras, the Hu Yaobang Era and the Jiang Zemin Era. He collected some bullet shells from Tiananmen Square in 1989. He reported on the conflicted anti- Japan issues in China. His interview with a leader of an anti- Japan website made him feel it is difficult for Chinese young people to understand modern Japan.

Listen to the podcast here. And see Hamamoto’s full bio on China Digital Times here.